Month: December 2013

In light of the Crysis testing I decided to kick the settings down from globally “very high” to globally “high” (blasphemy!) just to see how things would go. I’m happy to report that switching the settings down just one notch had a fairly massive impact. Using the “Welcome to the Jungle” stage again as a benchmark, framerates bottomed at 45fps and reached a high of 70fps. The average according to the FRAPs benchmark ended up at 57.8fps which is excellent. Leaving the benchmark on I passed that checkpoint and played straight through the recovery of the weapons, destruction of the tower, clearing of the minefield and firefight in the brush. This next block of content involves some intense combat as well as some non-action sequences so it seemed like a good representative test. After about 10 minutes of benchmarking the results came out consistent. The low slipped to 37 fps but the high stayed at 70 and the average came in right around 56 fps. I think it is fair to say that “high” settings will yield a consistent near 60 fps average with lows rarely dipping below 40 throughout the game. It also feels quite smooth and completely playable. So while it does suck having to drop settings, it is nice to see that you can stay close to 60fps even at 1440P surround and have the game still look fantastic. It requires close study of static images, honestly, to discern the difference between “high” and “very high”.

With some of the more intense testing (Metro, Crysis) out of the way, I decided to shift gears a bit and see how a less demanding game/genre would do. After all there is more to life than demanding FPS games! (really, there is!). Outlast is a really cool survival horror title that I have been enjoying a lot lately. It is extremely atmospheric and very well executed. In Outlast the 3 TITANs were able to maintain a rock solid 60fps. It would be nice to get the NVIDIA surround custom resolution bug sorted so the monitors could run in 120Hz as I suspect that in any of the less demanding titles like Outlast, maintaining over 60fps is quite possible. I took a video of a run through to provide a qualitative sense of game play:

Outlast runs fantastic, but it is an admittedly lightweight workload (although a terrific game that looks great). Shifting gears back to something more intense, I decided to give Bioshock Infinite a workout. Another excellent title and very graphically intense. I’ll let the video speak for itself:

Running the Bioshock Infinite benchmarking tool yielded the following results (inline with the video):